EMVCo and FIDO Alliance team up for mobile payment authentication
EMVCo, the global payment specification body, and the FIDO Alliance, an industry consortium developing open, interoperable authentication standards, are to collaborate and review how FIDO can support EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) payment use cases.
A “key aim” of the initiative is to investigate mobile payments using on-device authenticators, such as biometrics, as they seek to reduce consumer fraud globally.
Jonathan Main, EMVCo board of managers chair, says: “The payments community wants consumers to benefit from the simplicity of device-based authentication, which could be a fingerprint or facial recognition, for example. As the cardholder’s credentials are stored and processed on the mobile device, it means that the cardholder can be verified even if the device is not connected to a network.”
He adds that reducing consumer fraud in the mobile payment space is “most important”.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed to determine how and when payment use cases provided by EMVCo could be incorporated into FIDO Alliance’s technical standards.
Initial activities will explore how FIDO’s authentication protocol can be used to support EMVCo’s cardholder verification technology. The outcome of this will then “shape any combined future work efforts”.
EMVCo is collectively owned by American Express, Discover, JCB, MasterCard, UnionPay and Visa, and focuses on the “technical advancement” of EMV specifications.
